I have to post because today's date is so cool.
03/03/03!!!
Woo!
I never did talk about Friday's trip south, did I? Well, I went on a university trip to the National Monuments Record. In Swindon. The place houses all sorts of things - photos, aerial photos, plans, maps... it's a place that contains lots of archaeological and architectural archives. What makes it even more interesting is that it's inside the old Great Western Railway buildings. If you go upstairs to where they keep the red files you're in the section that they designed carriages in. It's a beautiful building. Anyway, we saw the place that a lot of the sensitive things are kept - like glass negatives. Or the outside of it. It's a huge sealed climate controlled warehouse (well, two, kind of joined together). And we saw the public enquiries part. And they did a lovely Powerpoint presentation.
But before we went there, as an extra bonus trip, we went to Avebury. The person who took us there, Dr Mark Gillings, has been involved in a project there for years. So he does a darned good tour. :)
Avebury is HUGE. Okay, in photos it doesn't look as impressive as Stonehenge, mainly because the stones are natural - they haven't been shaped. But when you're there it's incredible. The bank surrounding the circle is so big that you can't see anything outside of the henge - you can't even see the surrounding hills. It's 400m in diameter - so big that it had a medieval village inside it. It still has a pub, barn, tourist information centre (aka nonconformist chapel) and houses in it. The ditch that accompanies the bank is really deep - I thought about going down into it and climbing the bank but thought better of it. And what's more, as if the 100 enormous rough hewn stones weren't enough, there are two smaller circles inside it too. It's very strange since roads run through the circle, dividing it into quarters. It's a vaguely surreal experience.
And it's not like Avebury is the only Prehistoric monument in the landscape. There's the avenue of stones leading up to it, and you can see Silbury Hill from a nearby hill. And barrows all along the tops of surrounding hills. Silbury Hill is so strange - you'd think it was a modern spoil heap from some sort of gravel extraction (or the like), but it's ancient. It looks so out of place.
So, even though it was blustery and raining, and I had wet cold feet all day, it was well worth it.
That's about that, then.
Goodnight!
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